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Posted 23 March 2010 - 03:01 PM

What are your thoughts on morality concerning the possibility of artificial intelligence?

If we ever come to a point where we will have constructed artificial sentient beings that replicate human emotion and act like one of us, how do you think they would be treated in society? As a "person" under the law and general moral view? Or as an inferior race, subject to segregation, slavery, etc.?

I had a strange thought concerning this topic: imagine if in 50 years or so, we achieve this type of intelligence, and video games started to implement this kind of technology into their characters. These characters actually believe that they are part of the story that they are set in, and that their world is real. Would you consider it immoral to kill those beings within the game? Does uninstalling the game begin to have moral repercussions? Would being able to revive the characters justify the possibility of their execution within the game? What would be considered a peaceful removal from the game without infringing on the rights we bestow on these beings?

Man, imagine the characters begin to find bugs in the programming and start to question their existence.

Sir Kyle Aziz

Posted 23 March 2010 - 04:00 PM

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I say fuck AI. The only thing that can come from AI is it trying to take over the world. We don't need no Terminator/Matrix/I Robot/ any other robot induced apocalypse to occur here. But that's my two cents on AI.

Jimmy Rabbitte

Posted 23 March 2010 - 04:24 PM

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AI will probably never be made on the level of human intelligence, at least not for a looooooooong ass time. Computers are already way fuckin smarter than us at least when it comes to algorithms and computations but humans will have the upper hand in abstract thought for a long time. You can't feed a word problem to a machine. Still, we'll always be looking for ways to simulate human thought processes although we don't fully understand our own brains yet so get off the edge of your seat.

Humankind needs to accept the fact that even though it's king of the earth, it will eventually be phased out, and in all likelihood there are many, many lifeforms out there that are far more superior to us. So we can create robots to do dumb physical work but the moment we create an intelligence that has the same level of abstract thought that we do, it will already be superior to us for its greater capacity for memory, computational thought, and lifespan. I, for one, welcome our new AI overlord(s). Actually, I really hope I'm the nano-augmented badass that gets to merge with the first one.

Master C

Posted 23 March 2010 - 04:33 PM

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If we last long enough A.I will be humanities inheritors. The human brain is a computer, a freak product of nature and evolution. As sentient beings with increasing scientific understanding, we can produce something much better. And of course, these beings will have all the rights that a human has. We're all friggin hardware and software after all.

Jengerer have you ever considered that we are some form of simulation/video game? Scary huh?

way2lazy2care

Posted 23 March 2010 - 05:11 PM

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QUOTE (Jimmy Rabbitte @ Mar 23 2010, 04:21 PM)

AI will probably never be made on the level of human intelligence, at least not for a looooooooong ass time. Computers are already way fuckin smarter than us at least when it comes to algorithms and computations but humans will have the upper hand in abstract thought for a long time. You can't feed a word problem to a machine. Still, we'll always be looking for ways to simulate human thought processes although we don't fully understand our own brains yet so get off the edge of your seat.

computers aren't smarter. They are just better at doing what they are told.

Do you know how long it would take a computer to do the advanced risk reward computations our brains do every second? The human brain is still remarkably good at pattern recognition too.

AI currently in games is just lists of commands and options available to NPC to chose from when encountered in situations, very far from the learning thinking AI from science fiction. Learning computers have already been created but are still very limited by the programing that binds it. I don't realy know that much about it other than what I've seen in doco's but AI in gaming is far from being the first thing that AI will be implemented into.

But to actualy answer your question, I would feel little more remorse to killing a 'thinking' learning AI in a game as I am to killing any NPC right now... basicaly the same remorse I feel when stepping on an ant.

Jimmy Rabbitte

Posted 23 March 2010 - 06:32 PM

computers aren't smarter. They are just better at doing what they are told.

Do you know how long it would take a computer to do the advanced risk reward computations our brains do every second? The human brain is still remarkably good at pattern recognition too.

Yeah I know. Thats why I said computations and algorithms foolio. This means a computer can apply a procedure (memory) at speeds impossible to humans. Where humans excel is abstract thinking which uses reasoning, language, and a slew of other shit.

It takes a human to create a mathematical expression that describes a model of reality. Want to solve the expression numerically? ok, but it can get infinitely complex EASILY. A really smart human can solve it in days, maybe hours, depending on how many mistakes are made. A computer can solve it in minutes, and it WON'T make mistakes. So in a sense, computers ARE smarter than humans, in the right circumstance.

way2lazy2care

Posted 23 March 2010 - 06:37 PM

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QUOTE (Jimmy Rabbitte @ Mar 23 2010, 06:29 PM)

Yeah I know. Thats why I said computations and algorithms foolio. This means a computer can apply a procedure (memory) at speeds impossible to humans. Where humans excel is abstract thinking which uses reasoning, language, and a slew of other shit.

It takes a human to create a mathematical expression that describes a model of reality. Want to solve the expression numerically? ok, but it can get infinitely complex EASILY. A really smart human can solve it in days, maybe hours, depending on how many mistakes are made. A computer can solve it in minutes, and it WON'T make mistakes. So in a sense, computers ARE smarter than humans, in the right circumstance.

some humans can do difficult algorithms nearly instantly.

The various types of input we can take in are a much larger restriction than the brain's actual processing power. Where a computer can take in 1,000 s of numerals instantly, it takes a human a relatively long time to take them in. Mostly because we have to visually interpret and then use them. We can't really have any sort of numeral directly interpreted.

Rob`

Posted 23 March 2010 - 07:36 PM

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QUOTE (Jimmy Rabbitte @ Mar 23 2010, 11:29 PM)

It takes a human to create a mathematical expression that describes a model of reality. Want to solve the expression numerically? ok, but it can get infinitely complex EASILY. A really smart human can solve it in days, maybe hours, depending on how many mistakes are made. A computer can solve it in minutes, and it WON'T make mistakes. So in a sense, computers ARE smarter than humans, in the right circumstance.

But the computers needs a human to have already solved the problem in the general case before it can solve the problem in the specific case.

For example the old classic x^2+x+1=0, a computer can do this near instantly using the quadratic formula but it needs someone to have already solved the problem ax^2+bx+c=0 (ie finding the quadratic formula) before it can do it.

Or on a more basic level if you program it correctly a computer can find the quadratic formula using algebraic manipulation but it takes a human to discover how algebraic manipulation works.

So I would argue that computers are not smart, just remarkably good at the grunt work.

edit: holy shit why is this forum not accepting alt+253 or sup tags?

Edited by Rob`, 23 March 2010 - 07:38 PM.

Perhaps if this signature is witty enough, someone will finally love me.

I say fuck AI. The only thing that can come from AI is it trying to take over the world. We don't need no Terminator/Matrix/I Robot/ any other robot induced apocalypse to occur here. But that's my two cents on AI.

Computers are faster thinkers, but they aren't by any exclusive degree smarter. They still have to be programmed by a very rigid algorithm. Consider the "travelling salesman" issue, where, given many destinations, you have to find the shortest path connecting all the points that meets up back at the start. There is no known algorithm for solving that in polynomial time, so computers get really slow as the number of destinations increases (i.e, 2^30 steps to solve for 30 destinations), even if it's a straight line of destinations ('cause it has to check all possibilities). A human can look at that map, and just plot the closest points next to one another.

QUOTE (Master C @ Mar 23 2010, 05:30 PM)

Jengerer have you ever considered that we are some form of simulation/video game? Scary huh?

I bet its an RTS.

Yeah, if you read my Steam of Consciousness post in Arts & Literature, you'll see just how much I've thought about it, hahaha. Seems to be a huge mutant child of all the genres. MMOFPRTSRPG.

QUOTE (raw_genesis @ Mar 23 2010, 07:14 PM)

AI currently in games is just lists of commands and options available to NPC to chose from when encountered in situations, very far from the learning thinking AI from science fiction. Learning computers have already been created but are still very limited by the programing that binds it. I don't realy know that much about it other than what I've seen in doco's but AI in gaming is far from being the first thing that AI will be implemented into.

But to actualy answer your question, I would feel little more remorse to killing a 'thinking' learning AI in a game as I am to killing any NPC right now... basicaly the same remorse I feel when stepping on an ant.

But what if you became "friends" with the AI, because they could actively respond to you like a real person would? You don't feel remorse for stepping on an ant, because there's no relationship possibility with it (at least while you're sane). If you have a dog, which has a very limited relationship with humans (i.e, it can't talk, but it does seem to show some kind of affection, and display some emotion), you still feel sad when it dies, or have sympathy for it when it's injured, etc. There's no remorse with NPCs because we know that they're a fixed set of instructions, so you're not actually talking to it, but when the entity actually considers what we're saying and treats it like a human being, it's a little different.

Jimmy Rabbitte

Posted 24 March 2010 - 02:58 PM

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QUOTE (Jengerer @ Mar 24 2010, 07:34 AM)

Computers are faster thinkers, but they aren't by any exclusive degree smarter. They still have to be programmed by a very rigid algorithm. Consider the "travelling salesman" issue, where, given many destinations, you have to find the shortest path connecting all the points that meets up back at the start. There is no known algorithm for solving that in polynomial time, so computers get really slow as the number of destinations increases (i.e, 2^30 steps to solve for 30 destinations), even if it's a straight line of destinations ('cause it has to check all possibilities). A human can look at that map, and just plot the closest points next to one another.

Yes I was talking about that if you'll read the above posts. The fact that humans made computers and computers can't solve certain problems is largely irrelevant to my point though, given the right circumstance, a computer is faster and knows more than the vast majority, if not all, of humanity. Think the world's smartest people are better than computers? Hah! almost all of the world's scientists and ALL engineers depend on computers for the real meat of numerical analysis. Such a huge portion of mathematicians and computer scientists fresh out of college go on to work for Wolfram, Maple, etc, or if they're pioneers of their field they may go on to work on simulation programs, because humans aren't supposed to remember all these mathematical techniques without constantly using them and certainly don't want to.

Don't misinterpret my point as bashing humans, I'm using "smarter" as a colloquialism to say computers can do certain things a lot better than humans can. All of you were basically attacking my semantics even though I already agree with you... humans are definitely more versatile, clever, smart, and have capacity for abstract thought, but for the most part we can't be assed to remember brain-dead boring algorithms that take ages to solve, that's why we created computers. Why would we create something that doesn't do anything we can't do?